An Angel with a Gun Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Author’s note

  Also by the Author:

  Chapter 1 - Life in three parts

  Chapter 2 - Life in three parts

  Chapter 3 - Life in three parts

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  About the author

  Coming Soon.

  Also by the author

  Copyright

  An Angel with a Gun

  1st edition 2016

  Text by Guy Lilburne

  eISBN 978-1-63323-912-8

  Print ISBN 978-1-63323-913-5

  Published by www.booksmango.com

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Text & cover page Copyright© Guy Lilburne

  Edited by Burnie Sinclair

  Front & back cover photograph by Mikael Ranta

  Front & back over model: Miss Pitchayada

  Cover concept & design by Carlton Whitfield

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, stored or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are entirely drawn from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author, editors, researchers, copyright holder, publisher and contributors.

  Author’s note

  I live a very fortunate life. I live four minutes away from a tropical beach in Thailand. I make my living by writing books set in Thailand, a country that I fell in love with a long time ago. I travel all over Thailand researching my books and I meet the most wonderful people, foreigners, ex-pats and Thais. I have friends who I can sit and have a beer with and who will also give me constructive criticism of my work, whether I like it or not!

  As always I would like to thank my editor Burnie Sinclair and my good friend Jules Lee for proof reading and everything else that he helps me out with. I’d also like to thank the photographer, Mikael and model, Pitchy for the cover. We had great fun on the day of the photo shoot.

  They are two very talented people who I will work with again in the future. Thank you to my wife Aon for putting up with me and the long hours I spend sitting at my laptop writing these books and my baby Jack, who works hard trying to stop me writing!

  The biggest ‘Thank You’ is for you, the people all over the world who read my books. You make it all worthwhile.

  This book is dedicated to my beautiful children, Amy, Tom, Sasha and Jack. I will love you always.

  Also by the Author:

  The Thai Dragon.

  My Thai Story.

  The Kiss of the Dragon.

  Cocktails & Dreams.

  The Flower Girl.

  The Flower Girl (Japanese edition)

  Tika

  Graham, Just one shade!

  Snatched!

  Thai Shorts.

  My Thai Story II

  Living the Dream.

  Loving Life.

  Skin Trade.

  Taff’s Treasure.

  Coming soon; from Guy Lilburne.

  Another Day in Paradise.

  The boys are back again! Sloany and the rest of the gang are back as life settles down in Bang Saray after their epic adventure in Taff’s Treasure. The boys continue in their search for love and happiness while they enjoy their lives in the land of smiles and set out on more misadventures.

  Chapter 1 - Life in three parts

  (Part One)

  The Early years

  Did you ever have that feeling when you think that your whole life has been a waste of everyone’s time? Well I had that feeling for most of my life. Looking back now I can’t help but divide my life up into three parts. Part one was my life up until I first went to Thailand. Part two was my first trip to Thailand and part three was when I went to go and live in Thailand. It was only in part three that I realized that my life was worthwhile. It seemed to take forever to get to part three.

  My name is Steven West. I was born an only child to elderly parents who probably didn’t want me in the first place. I only realized that much later on in my life. As a child I didn’t know any difference. I just thought that everybody had the same sort of childhood that I had had. My dad always used to say ‘Children should be seen and not heard’. My mum didn’t really think that we should be seen either.

  That probably explains why I spent so much of my childhood in the cellar of our house. I really can’t remember if it was my idea to play down there or if I just used to being put down there, but there was a light and it was a great place to play. There were boxes full of all sorts of treasure and old photographs. My favourite box was my granddad’s old army stuff from the Second World War. I had never met any of my grandparents. They all died before I was born, but I thought that I knew my granddad William West because of his army box. It had some documents inside and some kind of passbook. I’m sure that they were all top secret, which was okay because I couldn’t read anyway. There were some medals, a tin helmet, a green woollen hat, a belt, a pair of boots and some badges. The best things in the box were a bayonet, a German Luger pistol, a German helmet and some German badges. For years I always thought that it must have been a lovely scene at the end of the war when all the soldiers were shaking hands and swapping souvenirs with each other, like they obviously did with my granddad. I must have been a teenager when my dad told me that granddad had killed the Germans and taken the souvenirs off their dead bodies. I was a bit shocked. I didn’t think war would have been so nasty. I didn’t just play army games in the cellar. I played lots of other games too. I could also stand on an upside down beer crate and look through the air brick and see out into the back garden. I used to watch the birds and they didn’t even know that I was looking at them. The air always felt cool and fresh on my face. I liked looking through the holes in the air brick.

  Another treat that I started to look forward to was the coalman delivering the coal. Every Wednesday morning I would hear the heavy coal truck stop outside the house and then the coal hatch would open and I could hear his heavy boots crunching on the gravel as he carried the sacks on his back and emptied them down the shoot into the cellar. The first time he saw my face looking up at him through the coal dust he jumped back and held his heart.

  “Blimey. You nearly gave me a heart attack you did.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you okay down there?”

  I just nodded. We sort of became friends and I was always waiting for him when he delivered the coal each week. After a while he started throwing down packets of sweets, cheese & onion sandwiches and cartons of juice. The coalman was my first best friend, but when mum and dad had a gas fire installed I lost my friend. We never really got to say goodbye, but I never forgot him.

  It was a neighbour who took me to school on my very first day. She had a boy who was the same age as me. They came to the door to collect me. I realized then that I was different from other kids. His name was Tom and he looked very smart. I could see that he was wearing a
school uniform and it was all new. I was wearing some second hand clothes that my mum had got for me and they were all too big and smelled a bit. They just smelt of being old really, but I did have a red school cap with the school badge on it and that was the best part of the uniform. I followed behind Tom and his mum as they walked hand in hand to school on that first day. When we got to the school gate Tom’s mum kneeled down and kissed him and hugged him and she cried a bit. She told him that she loved him and that she would be waiting for him at the gate when school finished.

  “Do you want to be my friend Tom?” I asked.

  “No, he doesn’t. Tom already has friends. You’ll have to find your own friends Steven. You can make friends with some of the children off the Meadows Estate.”

  Tom’s mum seemed quite angry with me, so I didn’t say anything else and I walked into the playground by myself. I didn’t know anybody because I had never been allowed to play out with anybody. All the other children seemed to be looking at me and I was looking back at them. I never had any friends at school because everyone already had enough friends and I was just too late to be allowed into any of the groups of friends. It was nobody’s fault. Things like that just happened in life. After that first day I walked to and from school by myself every day. I always remember that it rained a lot when I was a school boy and that made my clothes smell even more when I was sitting dripping wet in the class room. The only child who always smelt worse than me was Mary. But I’ll tell you all about her later.

  Sometimes I thought that I was just a burden to mum and dad, but other times they did something really special that made me think that they really did love me. One of those things was ‘Summer Camp’.

  Where I was brought up was a poor working class area. It was tough for families. The local authority started a Summer Camp for kids who had both parents working and couldn’t afford child care. Some children just went for a week or two. Others like me were sent from day one until the very last day of camp. Some children would be dropped off and picked up again each day. A few of us stayed there overnight, every night, because our parents were unable to collect us. My mum didn’t have a job, but she still sent me to camp anyway. I thought that it was a nice thing she did. There were quite a lot of children at Summer Camp of all different ages and I was excited to be there. It was like school, but it was all play and fun. We didn’t have teachers, we had camp leaders. I think that they were hippies. They drank lots of beer and smoked hand rolled cigarettes that smelt funny. There were six of them - four men and two ladies. We called them all Sir or Miss. They gave me a nickname and I was quiet proud that I was the only child who they gave a nickname to. It sort of made me stand out from the others. My nickname was ‘Shit Head’. Obviously, now that I am grown up, I realize that it wasn’t a very nice nickname, but at the time I was proud about having a nickname, because I thought that they must like me and it made me feel special.

  The Summer Camp was set up in the woods. It had a lake, some rocks for climbing and, of course, it was surrounded by trees. There were some wooden buildings like the dining room, the bathroom, the activity room, the offices and bedrooms for the camp leaders. But there were also lots of tents, which the children could play in and where the children who stayed overnight would sleep in.

  Because we were living out in the woods the quality of the food and hygiene suffered a little bit. Every time that I had spaghetti Bolognese I found a real live worm in it. I also found garden snails, cock roaches, beetles and a rat’s tail in my food. The camp leaders all laughed and told me that it wouldn’t kill me. So I just laughed too and enjoyed my time at Summer Camp. We had loads of mishaps during all the times I stayed there throughout my childhood. On a lot of nights my tent got blown away and I would wake up in the morning and have to find it and put it up again. Sometimes I got woken up by the rain. One time the camp leaders gave us all lemon squash to drink, but somehow mine had got mixed up with a bottle of urine by accident. They also played a lot of practical jokes to make everybody laugh. One time when I was climbing along on the high ropes between the trees they undid one end and I fell to the ground. Another time they made the wooden bridge collapse and I fell twenty feet into the lake. Once when we were playing paint ball they used catapults and stones to shoot me. It really hurt, but everyone laughed. I think the biggest laugh that they gave everyone was on the zip wire. We came down from a 50ft tower and we were stopped at the bottom by a huge plastic foam padding that was wrapped around an old oak tree. The foam was about 2 feet thick and very soft. Every time it was my go on the zip wire they always removed the padding and I crashed into the tree. Oh! They all laughed so much at that. I broke my arm on one occasion and I had to promise not to tell anyone about the practical joke. I never did.

  As I got older the cellar became my sanctuary. I spent more and more time down there. I really liked it. It was like my very own den. I even managed to get an old carpet, a table and a couple of odd chairs to make the place feel more like home. I collected books and comics and cards. In the winter it was freezing down there so I really had to wrap up warm. Some days I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. My mum said that I was a fat kid so I would never freeze to death. The more time I spent in the cellar the less I actually saw my parents. Most evenings when I came up from the cellar there would be a plate of food on the table for me with another plate overturned on top of it. Mum and dad would always be in their bedroom watching TV in bed. I wasn’t allowed in their room, but I always shouted ‘Goodnight’ when I went past the door and into my room. They never heard me. Sometimes my bedroom was as cold as the cellar and I had ice on the inside of the window. I would fall asleep watching my breath condensing in front of my eyes.

  The last time that I actually saw my mum was when I was about eight or nine years old. We still lived in the same house, but mum just stayed in her bedroom all the time. I saw dad sometimes and he would say hello before he went into mum’s room. My mum died of cancer when I was just ten years old. I already hadn’t seen her for about 18 months and I didn’t know that she was ill. I think dad was trying to protect me from some of the hardships of life.

  I was at home on the day that dad kept crying. It was summer time, but it was a grey wet day. It looked like night time all day long. I sat on a chair at the kitchen table and watched my dad cry. Different neighbours kept coming in and making him cups of tea. A lot of people were coming into the house and going up to my mum’s room. Nobody said anything to me, but by the looks on their faces I knew that I had done something wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. I was sure that sooner or later somebody would tell me and give me a smack around the face, but nobody did. In the afternoon two men came in funny black suits and they took some kind of folding trolley with wheels up the stairs to mum’s room and after about five minutes they brought it back down the stairs with a black canvass bag strapped onto it. They wheeled it outside and took it away in a hearse. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my mum and that was the last time I saw her. Well I saw the body bag that they took her away in.

  Dad cried all day and at that time I still didn’t know why he was crying. He cried a lot that week, even when he was drunk. A week later dad was all dressed up in the suit he used to dress in to go to weddings. He told me that mum was dead and that he was going to her funeral. He told me not to touch anything while he was gone. He walked out of the house and closed the door behind him. I ran to the window and looked outside. There was a row of cars parked outside and a lot of people standing around them. Everybody was dressed smartly in black or dark clothes. I saw the wooden box in the hearse and there were some flowers on it that spelt the name ‘Agnes’. That was my mum’s name and I knew that she was in the box. Dad got into the big black car behind that and all the people who had been standing around got into cars. The hearse carrying my mum pulled off and all the other cars followed. I waved goodbye to my mum through the window. I hadn’t actually seen her for a long
time, but I was still so very sad. I cried because I had just found out that she was dead and I’d never see her again. I was also sad because I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to her or tell her how much that I loved her. That has stayed with me all my life.

  I saw a lot more of my dad after mum died. I think that he was lonely just like me and we started spending time together. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we just sat in the same room together, but it was nice and I always remember them as happy times. My dad got some money after mum died and he bought a static caravan in Wales. We went there every year after that for a holiday. It always rained, but I’d never had holidays before and it was nice to be away from home.

  My teenage years were awkward really. I was as bad at being a teenager as I was at being a child. I still didn’t know anything and I still didn’t know how the world worked. I was part of it, but I wasn’t. I was always on the outside looking in and most of the time I didn’t really know what I was looking at.

  Just before I left school we had some careers advice. The assembly hall had some tables set out and people from all walks of life were there to talk to anyone who went up to their table. We had a teacher who was the school’s careers officer. To save time on what was going to be a very busy afternoon she came round all the fifth formers and gave us cards with numbers on. She said that we could only visit the tables that displayed the numbers on our cards. Some of the kids were given over ten cards. Some people just had a few. I was given just the one. It had the number thirteen on it. I was excited to see what table 13 had to offer. Whatever it was going to be, my careers officer was sure that it was going to be the job for me. I think that she knew more about me than I knew about myself.